


No Other Version of Me

by candyvan



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesia, Angst, Assassination, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dark, F/F, POV Alternating, Resurrection, Slow Burn, Violence, brain washing, time skip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 11:58:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18637678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candyvan/pseuds/candyvan
Summary: Five years after Allison dies, a mysterious figure donned in black has come to hunt the McCall pack.- - -"ᴡʜᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ʜᴇʟʟ ɪꜱ ᴀʟʟɪꜱᴏɴ?"





	No Other Version of Me

**Author's Note:**

> Jackson died at the end of season 2 bc fuck Colton Haynes. 
> 
> This was written because Emily doesn't know how to tell me to shut up.

She wakes to the cold. Her heart has abandoned her and left her for dead. The darkness of the night hangs over her like a mourner’s veil, each star burning as it touches her fresh eyes. The air is like dirt in her lungs; every inhale seems to bury her, but the man won’t let her stay in the ground.

From the mud and into the water. The man holds her head under the waves until the saltwater purifies her, washes the dust from her ventricles and cleanses the oozing red from the hole in her soul. She is reborn in the riptide. He dunks her again and again until she breaches the waves like a beggar at a king’s feet, a sinner with flames licking their heels.

She is nothing until he pours into her, filling the echoing chamber of her mind with his words. The sentences feel better than the empty void that sucked at the edges of her skull like a black hole.

Months later, when she is able to hold a spoon and stand on shaky feet, he bestows upon her another gift.

“It’s a ring dagger,” he says.

Her bone melts to metal as she takes hold of it; the knife is simply an extension of her very being. She breathes and feels the edge of the blade press against her lungs. She was made to hold this. She is not complete unless she holds this.

The knife is easier to pick up than walking or talking or eating or sleeping. The man smiles each time she flicks her wrist, a graceful dancer as she spins and lunges, presses the sharp corners of the dagger into the sagging skin of his throat, but never even thinks about sinking it in. 

The sky falls and rises and falls and rises and falls until he brings her out into the darkness again. Everything swirls together the longer she exists. She knows so many things now, like how to set a trap, or how to take apart a gun, or how to shoot an arrow, but she doesn’t know the name of the yellow ball that blinds her as it twists amongst the sky.

She doesn’t need to know. She only needs to know how to dig her dagger between a set of ribs, how to twist just right, what familiar crunch to listen for as organs shred beneath her grip.

“You did good,” the man says as she brings him back a bag of teeth, sharper than her own but not nearly as deadly, “but, next time, try to clean up after yourself, hmm?”

He tells her where to go. She does.

He tells her what to do. She does.

He tells her who to kill. She does.

When he points to a young one, eyes shining and mouth laughing, orders her to let her arrow fly, she finds herself hesitating. Her bow trembles in her unsteady grip. Her body doesn’t feel like her home. Her lungs don’t know how to work right. When she looks at her hands, all she sees is blood.

The man is angry at her. He drags her, pushes her into the water again, letting the ocean take her over and over until all that is bad within her is dredged. He hits her until her face is bleeding and she's gasping for breath, but she doesn't know how to raise a hand against him. Like a puppet with her strings cut, she flops against the cold stone floor of her room and lays there, waiting for his next order.

He doesn't give her one. Instead, he presses a glass vial to her lips and forces her head to tilt back and back until the honey-thick amber slides its way down her throat.

Next time, the arrow lands with a familiar _thunk_. She doesn’t even remember when her hands were shaking.

She cuts a monster in half, watches with unmoving, glassy eyes as the intestines cascade like a snipped rope, spilling into the dirt and leaves as interesting as a fly.

The man looks at the mess she’s made with a smile that twists too sharply, breathes, “You’re perfect.”

Then, he hands her another vial.

\- - - -

The knife barely misses Liam’s stomach.

Lydia is only able to see the sharp glint of metal catching in the moonlight. The figure donned in black moves just as fast as the werewolf, as if, somehow, they are evenly matched. Lydia is bolted to the forest floor, leg muscles tense, begging to flee. But she’s rendered useless as she stamps down the scream clawing in her throat.

Liam is not going to be another in the long line of dead supernaturals in Beacon Hills. Lydia refuses to let his death rattle leave her locked lips.

It gets harder and harder to hold it in as the seconds tick on, slow as molasses, as if time has stopped especially for them. Lydia watches with only the sharp bark of the tree at her back to support her shaking legs.

She needs to do something. She tries to call Scott, but her throat won’t work right, and her hands can’t stay still long enough to send a legible text.

Liam grunts as an edge teases against his thigh. The figure twists back, part dancer part gymnast as they escape the reach of his quick claws.

Lydia must make some type of noise; maybe Liam can hear the way her lungs strain against her chest, agony tearing through her muscles like a dragon fire as she struggles to keep her lips shut. He steps back, tilts his head, and howls so loud it echoes off the trees, sends birds flying to the sky, sends animals back into the safety of their nests.

It doesn’t stop the figure. Lydia yelps in her chest as Liam barely escapes the knife that slices where the open invitation of his throat waited only a hair’s breadth before.

Half an inch down from his carotid artery, Lydia watches a thin line of red blossom from his pale skin.

Tendrils of terror curl like knives into her gut. Liam is not Liam, not anymore. His face changes in the moonlight, becoming a kaleidoscope of loss before her. His features shift, the darkness emphasizing the ridge of Aiden’s nose, the cut of Allison’s jaw, the crystal eyes of Jackson. She can’t look at him as the agony rips through her like a chainsaw, cleaving her across the center.

Lydia is not a person anymore but a conduit, a vector for the scream to pass through, but she tries desperately to grab at it with her useless hands as it escapes her and floats through the thick night air, a promise written to the gods and signed with blood.

The knife swipes once more and Liam falls, gurgling and grunting as his own body drowns him. He lands amongst the dead leaves of the forest floor, clawing desperately at his throat, trying with futile hands to stop the river of red as it soaks into the dirt around him.

Like Liam, Lydia can’t breathe, wide eyes blown and skull cracked like an egg. The youngest of them, the most innocent of them, is dying at her feet, and she can’t even move an inch. For once in her life, her brain is quiet, flatlining.

The figure doesn’t stop to celebrate their victory. They grab the dagger from the flopping fish in the dirt and drag it across the sleeve of their leather jacket, quick and efficient, cleansing the blade of any remnant of Liam.

Then, they turn to face Lydia.

Another scream swells deep in her gut. Like a wave, it crests higher and higher, traveling up her body with the chill of the grim reaper’s touch. This one feels worse than the rest, like meeting a person who shares the same name, something familiar yet twisted, and Lydia knows with an aching clarity she will die here, alone, to the sound of her own scream and Liam's last whimpers.

How cruel, she thinks, to live a life of agony only to die like this.

The figure walks toward her with the slow, confident calculation of a predator who knows when they’ve caught their prey. Leaves crunch under their thick boots. Lydia’s skin gets colder and colder with each step like her body is preparing for the frigid air of the morgue.

This can’t possibly be it. She survived Beacon Hills. It’s been five years since she ran away from this town and never looked back; Lydia wouldn’t even be here if not to celebrate Scott and Kira’s wedding. He swore things were different, that she would be safe, that they all could just exist and dance and reminisce. They were happy, he said. Beacon Hills was safe, he said. 

He _promised_ and now Liam’s dead at her feet and her corpse is soon to follow.

It’s the anger at the injustice of it all that lights the match beneath her ribs. She’s this close to solving the Hodge Conjecture. Now, she’s going to die, alone, in the very forest she’s worked her entire life to escape, with no accolades or honors or medals to boast of.

Her life, the summation of her intellect, of her hopes and dreams, of her wit and heart, will all amount to nothing.

And she’s furious.

The wail thumping at the walls of her chest builds like a war drum, stabbing against her lungs with each beat of her frantic heart. She pushes against the tree which anchored her, pausing the figure in their tracks. Their hooded face twists like a dog at a curious noise, like Lydia is something new they’ve yet to encounter, something they want to pick at like Lydia’s millennium problem.

She refuses to give this murderer the chance.

The scream doesn’t escape Lydia like it has too many times before, slipping between her teeth and fleeing her tongue like a wraith. She contorts it, grips it tight between her lips and forces it out in a bone-chilling screech.

It tears through her like a great shard of glass, ripping her vocal cords to ribbon. The banshee scream digs its claws deep into her throat, refusing to be used as anything more than a siren, but she drags it out of her with sweat and tears and fear that grips her spine so tight she fears she may shatter.

The force of the scream punches the hooded figure with the strength of Lydia’s soul. The wind howls like a hurricane and the figure flies back, cracking into the nearest tree with a sharp thump that makes her nerves rattle.

But, she can’t stop. The scream has started and it refuses to end. She’s broken whatever cycle death started and it punishes her now, pushing her throat past its limit, crushing her under the weight of the strain of living.

Like an endless void, the scream keeps coming, pushing past her split lips and hurtling against the figure. It crashes into them over and over again, keeping them pinned to the tree, and Lydia is suddenly terrified of what will become of her when this scream dies out. She closes her eyes against reality, wanting desperately to escape.

The crescendo is ending now. The sweat building on her brow intermingles with the tears racing down her cheeks.

Then, the wind stops, and when Lydia opens her eyes, she wants to scream all over again.

The howl of her scream has forced the figure’s hood to fall back and there before her stands Snow White with hair as black as night, skin as white as snow. Snow White, laying in a casket, gaunt cheeks red as she waits for a kiss from her prince that will never come.

“Allison?” Lydia breathes into the hunger of the night, voice a deadened rasp.

She flips her blade, catches it by the hilt, and demands, “Who the hell is Allison?”

Then, she lunges. 


End file.
